Laban Emptied the Flock Before Heaven Paid Jacob

Laban did not wait for morning. The words of the agreement were still hanging over the pens and his hands were already in among the animals, pulling out every goat marked on its feet, every speckled hide, every streaked one, every black lamb in the flock.

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He handed them to his own sons and sent them off. By dark there were three days of road between the marked animals and the plain ones Jacob would be walking out at dawn.

The arrangement had been Jacob's idea. Leave me the odd-colored ones, he had said, and take the rest, and come through the flock any day you like, and if you find a clean animal in my hands you can call me a thief in front of witnesses. Laban had agreed fast, the way a man agrees when he has just heard something he already intends to break.

Three Days of Road

Jacob came into the fold the next morning and heard the difference before he saw it. The pens were quieter. Every animal left in them was the color of dust, plain as a wall, and the wage he had negotiated had been driven north in the night by four of his brothers-in-law.

Fourteen years he had already spent in these fields, seven of them for a wife he had not been given and seven more for the one he had wanted at the start. This was the first arrangement in his adult life in which anything was supposed to end up his.

Laban went home and did the arithmetic. No marked animals in the breeding stock meant no marked lambs at the birthing, and no marked lambs meant no wage owed, indefinitely, at no cost to anybody. He found the sum clean.

The Peeled Rods in the Water Troughs

Jacob cut rods from poplar, almond, and plane, and peeled white stripes down the green bark until the wood underneath showed through in bands. He stood them in the gutters and the drinking troughs where the flocks came in thirsty, and the animals conceived in front of the peeled wood.

The lambs came out streaked. Then spotted. Then streaked again.

He set the marked ones apart for himself and would not let them mix back into Laban's stock. He put the rods out for the strong animals and left them out of the troughs for the weak, so that the feeble young went to Laban and the sturdy ones went to Jacob.

Laban came back to count, and the count would not sit still. His face changed the way a merchant's face changes when the ledger and the storeroom stop agreeing. He walked the pens looking for the door he had not drawn on his own map, and it opened again every time a ewe lay down.

The Wage Changed Ten Times

So he rewrote the terms. Speckled shall be your wage, he said, and the whole flock bore speckled. Streaked, then, he said, and the whole flock bore streaked. Ten times he changed the agreement, and ten times the animals answered the new wording inside a season.

Jacob slept and saw the rams that mounted the flock, and every one of them was streaked and speckled and grizzled, and a voice in the dream told him it had watched everything Laban was doing to him.

He woke up rich and knew whose doing it was. He kept working anyway. Six more years, with the sons of Laban standing at the edge of the field saying out loud that Jacob had taken everything their father had, and Laban's face toward him no longer what it had been the year before.

The Argument Over Full Bellies

When it finally broke, and Laban had chased him seven days into the hill country of Gilead over a set of missing household gods, Jacob stopped running and made his own accounting out loud in front of both households.

Twenty years in your house. Your ewes and your she-goats never miscarried. I never once ate a ram out of your flock. Whatever was torn by animals I did not bring to you to look at, I made it good out of my own hand, whether it went missing by day or by night. The heat ate me in the daytime and the frost at night and sleep left my eyes.

It was the line about the ewes that carried the weight. A man's blessing shows up first in the bodies of his animals, in ribs nobody can count from ten paces off and in ewes that carry to term. Whoever is righteous knows the appetite of his beast, and a well-fed ox puts a harvest in the barn. Laban's flocks under Jacob's hands had thickened and bred and dropped healthy young for twenty years, and in all that time he had never once had to go looking for the reason.

The Heap of Stones on the Hill

They piled stones on the ridge and ate a meal on top of the pile, which is what men do when they have run out of ways to hurt each other and are not sorry.

Laban named the heap in Aramaic and Jacob named it in Hebrew and both names meant the same thing, a pile that watches. Let the Lord keep watch between you and me when we are out of each other's sight. Neither of them was talking about affection.

In the morning Laban kissed his daughters and his grandchildren and went home. Jacob went on toward the river with wives, children, servants, camels, and a slow moving weather of livestock that had been, on a certain afternoon twenty years and one contract earlier, a fold full of plain animals nobody thought was worth guarding.

Esau was coming the other way with four hundred men.